It has already become a cliche to note that the official return to economic growth does not mark a meaningful end to the Great Recession for most people.
With jobless numbers reaching into the double-digits in many parts of the country -- including in my home state of North Carolina, where unemployment stands at about 10.4 percent -- the concept of an economic recovery remains a bit... abstract.
And given the belated interest on the part of mainstream pundits in the plight of the unemployed, I want to take a moment to give a little credit where it's due.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been writing for years about the persistently high unemployment rate among low-skilled workers in the United States, and I have been largely ignoring those columns for an equal number of years.
I was, after all, well on my way to a college degree, so there didn't seem much prospect of ending up in the pool of chronically unemployed workers left behind by America's shift away from manufacturing. Herbert himself wrote of the difficulty in getting policymakers to pay much attention to the problem.
"The cold truth is that tens of millions of hard-working (or potentially hard-working) men and women have no real economic future in a system that is thoroughly dominated by a ruthless corporate elite and the politicians who do their bidding," Herbert wrote... in 1995. "We are allowing this to happen with little more than a whimper of protest."
Well, that whimper is now growing into a roar, and the reason is perfectly simple: chronic unemployment is not only afflicting "low-skilled" workers, but college grads with every reason to expect an easy route to middle class jobs.
In a column this past Saturday, Herbert once again makes his case -- "there is no sign of the kind of recovery in employment that would be needed to bring the American economy and the economic condition of American families back to robust health" -- and this time people are paying attention.
Because Saturday's column was not about high school dropouts or "at-risk" inner city youth; it was about bright, eager college graduates. It was, in other words, about the children of parents who read the New York Times.
"If we're having trouble finding employment for even these kids, then we're doing something profoundly wrong," Herbert concludes.
On some level, it's got to depress the poor man that he's finally getting heard not because policymakers have warmed to his message of an employment crisis for working class families, but because we've degenerated into an employment crisis for college-class families.
It's the same kind of media bias that affects crime reporting; a murder of a 21 year-old high school dropout gets only a fraction of the coverage that a murder on a college campus would attract.
Our attention is drawn naturally to the unexpected, and the sad truth is that policymakers have developed a kind of immunity to news of hardship among those "low-skill" workers Herbert has been writing about for more than a decade. (And while we're on this subject, let's remember that college grads are very much a minority in the United States; the vast majority of Americans will never hold a bachelor's degree).
Only when faced with something unexpected, something that goes against our preconceived notions of the world -- something like unemployed Columbia Law grads -- do we really pay attention.
When the economic tide eventually does rise again, let's hope there's a renewed focus on making sure it lifts all boats, not just those that have sailed through campus.
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